Hey everybody! Last night, just as as I was deciding to forego sleep in favor of homework and fellowship applications, I realized that it may be a while before I squeeze the few minutes I need to polish up and roll out my new blog. While I don’t have time to write religiously, I feel like I should probably warm up this dead little guy every week or so just to fill you all in on general Anna doings.

When even my father, the man who is ever imploring me to acquire marketable skills, joined the “Anna you don’t want to chain yourself to a career straight out of college” bandwagon, I figured it was time to listen. Thus, I am frantically compiling applications for early-deadline fellowships to travel and study next year. I am pretty excited about the Fulbright right now, as a representative of the Scandinavian media group Schibsted has agreed to sign a letter supporting my application! It is a very competitive fellowship, so I am trying not to get my hopes up, but studying international media in Norway would be awesome — to say the least.

After I finish polishing up my Fulbright, I’ll lay in on my Watson application. The Watson fellowship awards students $25,000 to spend one year doing new things in new places. During that year, Watson fellows cannot go anywhere they have already been, including returning home, but they are free to travel the world and research their proposed topic in fun and creative (and, I’d imagine, even stressful and demanding) ways. For that I am proposing to travel around Eastern Europe to study relationships between political boundaries and culture patterns.

So that’s all I’m doing at the moment, frantically trying to pull together plans for Life while still accomplishing mundane tasks like homework and eating. Hope everybody’s well. If you leave a comment on any of these posts and don’t see it in a few days, send me an email and alert me to the fact. Comment spam is out of control and I might not always see the few gems of true interest amidst the slew of online poker solicitations.

You might have noticed that I don’t write too often anymore. There are a few reasons for this:

1) I’ve been working on a new blog written in Django. It works alright, the problem is that it’s not perfect and I don’t want to use it before it is. So I’m in blog limbo.
2) Comment spam is getting obscene and for some reason my passive-aggressive frustration is manifesting itself as a blogging boycot.
3) I’ve been crazy busy.

But I’m sure everybody has been checking daily and lamenting my inactivity, so I relent. I write.

I’m at Vassar! I live in a great house with wonderful roommates and soon-to-be-wonderful (crossing fingers) furniture. I was hoping to whittle in down to 4 classes, but I’m taking 5:

* Senior Seminar (Media Studies)
* Operating Systems (Computer Science)
* Criminology (Sociology)
* The Avant-Gardes (Art History)
* Grammar (French)

So that’s a full schedule. I spent 6 hours on French last night and felt like the stupidest person in the universe (checking the dictionary for every elementary word that I ONCE KNEW is very little fun) but I understood more than some of the kids in class today so I don’t feel like a total imbecile. I’m sure it will do cheesy things like enrich my life as well as practical things like qualify me for graduate school. I’m applying for a Watson fellowship to study cartography in Eastern Europe next year, so the more language the better.

I’ll be doing a lot of work this semester, but it’s actually easier to work in an apartment than a dorm. There aren’t so many people running in and distracting me and food is much quicker / cheaper / tastier. I figure I’ll take a break next semester, load up on easy-but-interesting classes (boredom is worse than frenzy), and enjoy the tail end of my senior year. So there, I’ve written, I’ll try to do it again.